By CentralBankNews.info
The Bank of England (BOE) maintained its Bank Rate at 0.5 percent along with its current stock of assets at 375 billion pounds, as widely expected.
As usual, the central bank of the United Kingdom added in its brief statement that its decision was taken in the context of its monetary policy guidance from August.
In August the BOE said it would not raise its base rate, unchanged since March 2009, until the UK unemployment rate fell to 7.0 percent. But due to a faster-than-expected decline in unemployment along with a stronger recovery in the UK economy, the BOE in February revised its forward guidance.
Instead of tying its monetary policy stance to a single economic indicator, the BOE said it would only raise rates when there was less slack in the economy and pointed to 18 different economic indicators that it would be watching to gauge the level of slack in the economy.
The UK unemployment rate remained steady at 7.2 percent in the three months to January from the previous three months while Gross Domestic Product expanded by 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013 from the third quarter for annual growth of 2.7 percent, up from 1.8 percent.